Today marks the release of my first novel, Angel’s Truth. The novel’s the first volume in the Angelwar trilogy, a Fantasy adventure set on an imagined world in a medieval-type era that I wrote over three years. The subsequent volumes, Angel’s Deceit and Angel’s Knight, will be released over the next two months. They complete a wider story arc begun in the first book, but Angel’s Truth is also a self-contained story that can be read on its own.

As I write this, the book’s appeared on Amazon UK, and should shortly go live on Amazon.com as the USA passes midnight and begins the 26th August. It has been a long time coming: I’ve been writing for 11 years now. It began as a bit of a fun – a hobby – and I wrote several novels over the first five or six years. I fell in love with writing during this time, and slowly got better with each successive book despite never really learning how to write a novel. Eventually, I wrote the novel preceding Angel’s Truth and I showed it to a couple of people. The feedback was positive, and I decided that maybe I ought to learn about the craft of writing a novel. At this point I’d avoided writing books because I loved the freedom of just writing and didn’t want to lose the joy of writing by learning all the nuts and bolts – what if it became too formulaic? What if it stopped being enjoyable? Writing was fun, but also a creative outlet that I needed.

It was, perhaps, a gamble but I took the plunge (best described in a short but dull video montage showing me huddled over a series of books) and began to learn: I read some of the popular books on writing (I already had Steven King’s On Writing but that was it), did some research into techniques here and there, and later (after completing the first drafts of the trilogy) joined a writing community. The result of all of this was the first draft of Angel’s Truth, and now – several years later – I’m proud to say that it’s now available in ebook (and shortly paperback) via Amazon.

Today I finished compiling my manuscript ready for paperback publication via Amazon’s Createspace. The first time – a few months back – proved to be tricky, but this time I felt much more comfortable in what I was doing. Then I realised that’s because this is my seventh journey through this process this year – seventh in under 6 months, actually. Because I’m releasing a trilogy, that’s three books which need to be formatted for paperback. I did an initial draft run in early May for all three books so that I could give the cover designer an accurate page count (necessary in order to work out the required thickness of the spine).

It was something of a learning process, and I skipped a few steps to make this quicker. I did all the formatting, but in terms of content I left out a few things: I focused on the novel itself and left space for things like the maps, front matter like the copyright page, and acknowledgements and so forth at the back of the novel. So, after I received the completed cover files (and they’re really rather great) I needed to re-format the paperbacks (because I’m exporting from Scrivener rather than building the whole thing in Word), but this time with the front and back matter added in. This, though is where things get out of step: I exported and formatted book one first (taking the total up to 4 paperback builds). While I was waiting for that to arrive, I did the same for book two (taking the total to 5).

I’ve now proofread book one and made final changes to book one. I submitted those (taking the total to 6), and today did the draft proof for the final book of the trilogy, which takes the total up to 7 export-format cycles. I still have the final, final paperbacks to build for books two and three once I’ve finished proofreading and making corrections, so there’ll be a total of nine run-throughs of this whole process. But I’m almost there, and by going through this process several times I’ve managed to get a better grasp on how it all works, and when it’s time for my next book (due some time next year) this will – hopefully – be a smoother, more streamlined process.

The other week I picked up Jodi Taylor’s Just One Damned Thing After Another, the first volume in her Chronicles of St Mary’s series. I loved it – really, really loved it. Sure, I’d been starved of fiction for a while due to other commitments, but even so I really enjoyed the novel. So much so, in fact, that the next day I downloaded the next book in the series, A Symphony of Echoes. That took me over the weekend and into the working week, and I whizzed through it, utterly hooked on the series. Over the course of six nights I read the first five books in The Chronicles of St Mary’s, and I loved every single one of them: they’re packed with action, history, humour, and silliness. But not just that – there’s darkness there, too, both triumphs and failures for our heroine, Max, and her friends.

After reading the first five I had a break for a couple of nights, but I was so absorbed I soon returned to the series, and hungrily finished books 6, 7, and 8 over three nights, which takes me almost to the end of the series so far. There is a ninth volume, a collection of short stories set in the same story world. I rarely read shorter fiction – I prefer to get lost in longer books – but I may well pick it up soon.

Jodie Taylor’s Just One Damned Thing After Another is a fantastic read. The opening of a series, it’s a story about disaster-prone historians and their exploits at research with, well, time machines. It’s a combination pretty much guaranteed to deliver action and disaster, and Taylor’s book does just that. That, however, isn’t the defining characteristic of the book. Where the author really excels is in the characters, and the book is full of wonderful, believable characters – a treasure trove of vivid personalities with more sense of adventure than judgement or wisdom, and foremost among them is the novel’s protagonist, Max, whose eyes we see historial research institute of St Mary’s for the first time as she joins a motley bunch of quirky characters.

The novel’s fast-paced but loses nothing because of it. The author’s great at getting to the essence of characters very quickly, and the book grabs you by the scruff of the neck in the first chapter and doesn’t let up until the end. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, but the book is sharp, funny, and thoroughly absorbing.

After a break from reading, I felt like picking up something entertaining, and this book was more than up to the task. I read it in under 24 hours and am already itching to find out what happens in the next volume of The Chronicles of St Mary’s.

Bryan Wigmore’s The Goddess Project is an outstanding debut and a wonderful story – perhaps even more so because it defies easy categorisation. At its heart are great, believable characters – both good and bad – in a richly described setting, with a wonderful plot that remains unpredictable and intriguing right to the end of the novel. Together, these elements combine to offer something that feels unique and original, a novel unlike anything I’ve read before.

The story develops quickly, revealing itself chapter by chapter. It begins as a tale about freediving treasure-seekers, but it soon becomes clear there’s so much more to the tale: magic, technology, adventure, a conspiracy, and a central mystery that drew me in and kept me hooked. After the initial setup, the book was incredibly hard to put down and proved to be a great read. I’m already looking forward to the author’s next book, and would recommend this to anyone who loves great Fantasy. This, to me, is how Fantasy should be: a magical tale that transports you to another place.